Hawkeye

Hawkeye has always been something of a joke in the Marvel Universe. He is the one member of the Avengers who has no superpowers--he can just shoot arrows really, really good. He did get himself a spot in the gigantic film version of The Avengers, played by Jeremy Renner, but it's highly unlikely he'll get a stand-alone film. After all, a guy who can just shoot arrows can't really stand up to supervillains.

As Hawkeye, real name Clint Barton, puts it in his own book, written by Matt Fraction: "You cowboy around with the Avengers some. Guys got, what, armor. Magic. Super-powers. Super-strength. Shrink-dust. Grow-rays. Magic. Healing Factors. I'm an orphan raised by carnies fighting with a stick and a string from the paleolithic era."

I had read that Hawkeye was the best superhero book of 2013, so I have been reading issues over many of the last months. They are collected in four volumes, all written by Fraction and illustrated by David Aja, Javier Pulido and other artists. These books are unlike any superhero comics I've read, far different in tone and style than the comics I grew up with in the '70s. I'm not quite sure yet if I approve, but I have to say I was intrigued and stimulated by them.

Hawkeye goes all the way back to 1964, one of the many characters created by Marvel's Stan Lee. As he points out, he does not have a super power--he has a skill. There are other Marvel characters who don't have super powers, such as his long-time love Black Widow, but his skill is so narrow that he seems something of an anachronism. The strongest memory I have of Hawkeye from my childhood days is when he was sort of exiled to the West Coast Avengers, along with second-tier heroes like Wonder Man and Tigra. In one episode he was disgusted and quit, training a billionaire in archery. It turned out the billionaire wanted to explode a nuclear bomb that would dump California into the sea, thus making his desert property instantly beach-front property. The billionaire wants to detonate the bomb with a bow and arrow. Hawkeye defeats him by hitting the billionaire's bowstring with his own arrow, and rejoins the group.

Reacquainting myself with Hawkeye was a culture shock. I stopped reading Marvel Comics regularly about twenty-five years ago. Since then so much has happened. The history of a Marvel character is as tangled as any soap opera, as they take on different identities and even have their lives start over again. Turns out Barton spent some time as Goliath, and then was called Ronin. He was even replaced for a while by a woman called Hawkeye, real name Kate Bishop, who was a member of the Young Avengers. I don't know how anyone can keep it all straight.

So in Matt Fraction's books, we see Hawkeye while he is not an Avenger. I wrote in my review of Avengers: Age of Ultron, that having Barton secretly a family man was an outrage to a purist. The "real" Barton is something of a rapscallion, living in a run-down apartment building in Bed-Stuy. An orphan, he grew up in carnivals and circuses. He has romanced Black Widow, and married and divorced Mockingbird. He has issues of self-loathing, and has also somehow gotten ahold of millions from his brother (how was unclear to me). He uses the money to buy his building from Russian mobsters, who wear velour tracksuits and call everyone "bro." He tends to get the tar beaten out of him in almost every issue.

Bishop is now his sort of sidekick, although she might claim it's the other way around. They do battle with a couple of super villains: Madame Masque, who is part of the criminal underworld, and The Clown, a psychotic assassin who wears clown makeup (given the place The Joker has in pop-culture, it's a surprise that anyone would try that). There are also some really weird one-shot issues, including one that is told from the perspective of a dog, another that has Bishop helping an old rock star clearly modeled on Brian Wilson, and another that is a children's animated Christmas special.

Fraction has some of the old Marvel ethos to him. The characters are supremely sarcastic, and quip in between punches. But I have to believe he was attracted to Hawkeye for his ordinariness (although he is an expert fighter--he was trained by none other than Captain America). The action in these books is not of the intergalactic variety--it's comparitively mundane.

The stories are also told in a completely different way. Marvel Comics of the '60s and '70s made heavy use of exposition, even putting asterisks in the word balloons to tell us what issue they were referring to. Fraction's Hawkeye doesn't do that--he makes assumptions about things and you either know them or don't. I had to go onto the Marvel Universe Wiki to figure some things out, such as who Barton's ex-wife was (I thought he married Black Widow, but maybe that was Daredevil).

He also takes a lot of risks. I mentioned the one-offs that he uses, but he also tells the stories very non-linearly, with use of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and parallel stories. In the issue involving the dog, for instance, we first hear of collar stays, which will be important in a later issue. It was only in re-reading the issues that I realized what was going on.

The art is also very different. Long gone are the sequence of panels that were like storyboards for movies. The layout is daring and at times confusing, with full page splashes and occasionally long stretches of art without text. There is also some clever use of sound effects. Instead of "Bam!" and "Pow!" we get "Ooomfoot!" when a door is kicked in, or "KGlassss!" when an arrow shoots through a plate-glass window.

Oh, and those arrows. Hawkeye has a variety of trick arrows, and Fraction has fun as during a car chase his hero gets to use them all. They have nets, cables, putty, and one boomerangs. It's the one comic book superhero trope that Fraction uses. Since this Hawkeye doesn't wear a costume, it's allowable.

And, by the way, I would have loved to see Renner play this Clint Barton in a stand-alone film. If the DC equivalent, Green Arrow, can gets his own TV show why not Hawkeye?